Speakers at SLAM!

Here are the bios of our speakers at SLAM!, starting with the moderator

Anne-Marie Colliander Lind is a recognised force in the global language industry landscape. She has spent more than 25 years helping multinational organisations solve their language issues, serving in executive sales and management positions at leading service, technology, and market research companies. Currently, Anne-Marie is the CEO of Inkrea.se, a management consulting company based in Sweden that assists companies in their growth and development strategies. She is a sought-after speaker and part-time engaged as Marketing Director at LocWorld. Anne-Marie is the co-organiser of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum (NTIF) which takes place for the 8th time on 21-23 November 2018 in Oslo.

Judy Jenner is a Spanish and German business and legal translator and a federally court-certified Spanish interpreter. She has an MBA in marketing and runs her boutique translation and interpreting business, Twin Translations, with her twin sister Dagmar. She was born in Austria and grew up in Mexico City. A former in-house translation department manager, she is a past president of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association. She writes the blog Translation Times, pens the "Entrepreneurial Linguist" column for The ATA Chronicle, and is a frequent conference speaker. She is the co-author of The Entrepreneurial Linguist: The Business-School Approach to Freelance Translation. Her special talent is (trying to) memorize airport codes.

Kenneth Quek is an ethnic Chinese Singaporean who resides in Helsinki. He is fully bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese, speaks the Teochew and Hokkien topolects, and works as a freelance academic revisor for the University of Helsinki Language Centre as well as a freelance editor and copywriter in the corporate sector. He has previous experience in private teaching, translation and journalism. He is a founding member of NEaT (Nordic Editors and Translators) and currently serves on its board.

Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies, Stockholm University

Helena Bani-Shoraka (left), PhD, is a senior lecturer at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation studies (TÖI). Her thesis dealt with multilingualism and code-switching among Azerbaijan-Turkish families in Teheran. She is a sociolinguist and her research interests include topics from the use of interpreters in highly specialised rehabilitation care to intensive Swedish for newly-arrived high-school students. Helena is also an active interpreter.

Magnus Dahnberg (right), PhD, is a senior lecturer at TÖI. He defended his thesis at Uppsala University in 2015 on interpreter-mediated conversations as role-play. The use of role-play in interpreter training and testing is still among his research interests. He is also the former head of the Swedish Armed Forces Language School, a Swedish-Russian interpreter and translator of Russian literature into Swedish.

Jan Runesten set up his own legal practice/translation business twenty years ago after working as a company lawyer in several companies for a number of years. His work in both roles is mainly focused on various aspects of commercial law. He became an authorised translator in 2001 and has been Vice President of the European Legal Interpreters and Translators Association (EULITA) since 2017. He is also a local councillor in the municipality of Ekerö where he lives.

Ingegärd Steen set up her translation business in Gothenburg in 2001 after venturing into various fields, including retail, interior decoration and the equestrian world, and has been an authorised translator since 2007.

Ingegärd translates several types of texts, focusing on marketing and law, but basically anything but technology. She has also translated four children’s books.

Ingegärd holds a BSc in business administration, an IHM diploma in copywriting and has studied German at the University of Gothenburg.

Mattias Hovmöller is an authorised translator between English and Swedish (both directions) after passing Kammarkollegiet's examinations in 2016 and 2017. He translates and edits various types of texts, mainly in the fields of IT & computer technology, administration, marketing, law and economics.

Besides translating, He is also experienced in teaching English, French, Swedish and mathematics in upper secondary school. His university studies include languages and subjects such as English, French, Latin, Classical Greek, linguistics, pedagogy, mathematics and the history of ideas.

Based in the Skarpnäck area of southern Stockholm, Mattias enjoys playing board games, going for runs in the forest and skiing when he is not working on (or playing with) words.

David Rumsey is the immediate past president of the American Translators Association (2015-2017). In that position, he was in contact with several key players within government and industry and has provided sessions on translation and interpreting at the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), Society of Technical Communicators (STC), the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the US Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR). He has been featured on television in the US by CNBC and PBS’ Nightly Business Hour. Since entering the profession in 1990, David has worked on all sides of the industry, including as a project manager at two US-based agencies, an project manager for localization efforts at a large software firm, and as a freelance translator since 2004 from his home near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Tiina Kinnunen, b. 1963, is a Finnish professional subtitler and translator who has been working in the field for over 30 years, training and mentoring numerous translators as well. She’s an active participant in translation conferences and contributor to university education of translators in the form of guest lectures and university visits.

Alina Frantsuzova is a Russian-Swedish public service interpreter. She has been an authorised interpreter since 2014 specialising in healthcare and court interpreting. Alina holds a master's degree in linguistics and translation studies from Northern Arctic Federal University (Arkhangelsk, Russia) and has served on the board of the Swedish Association of Court interpreters (Rättstolkarna) since 2016. She is currently writing her postgraduate thesis on the lingvo-semiotics of court intepreting in Sweden at Northen Artic Federal University.

Tess Whitty is an English-Swedish freelance translator specializing in corporate communications, software and IT. She has a M.Sc. in Economics and a M.A. in marketing and previously worked as a marketing manager. She shares her knowledge and experience in marketing and business as an award winning speaker, trainer, consultant, author and podcaster.

Thomas West is a law graduate and former lawyer who has 25 years of experience in translating complex legal documents from a number of languages into English. He served as President of the American Translators Association (ATA) from 2001 to 2003, and is certified by ATA for translation from French, Spanish, German and Dutch into English. A dedicated polyglot and teacher, he has conducted legal translation workshops throughout Europe, Latin America, the United States and South Africa, and is a regular participant in the online polyglot community. Tom is the author of two popular dictionaries: Spanish-English Dictionary of Law and Business (2nd edition, 2012) and the Trilingual Swiss Law Dictionary (2017).

Ian Mac Eochagáin is an entrepreneur, translator and editor who works with Finnish, Russian, Swedish and his native English. Originally from Ireland, and with a stint in Russia behind him, he now lives in Finland, where he primarily translates from Finnish to English. He studied Russian in university, but clearly did not think it had enough cases, as he went on to learn Finnish. He is a board member of Nordic Editors and Translators (NEaT) and vice-chairman of the board of the Translation Industry Professionals trade union.

Lotta Hellstrand is an interpreter working in Swedish and English. She is a certified court interpreter and her main professional area is interpreting within the legal system. She has also been a certified medical interpreter since 2018 and does conference interpreting including AGMs and trade union conferences. She is the chair of the Swedish Association of Court Interpreters (Rättstolkarna), elected in 2018, but she has served on the board of the organisation since its inception in 2011.

Tapani Ronni is an ATA-certified translator for English into Finnish (since 2005) and translates mainly scientific and medical documents. Tapani got his Ph.D. in Genetics at University of Helsinki, Finland and was then a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. He is currently a Grader and Finnish Language Chair for the ATA Certification program, and past Administrator for the Nordic Division. He has been an invited speaker at six ATA conferences.

George Drummond, a Member of the AIIC Legal Interpreting Committee, works as a freelance conference interpreter for international courts and tribunals in Hamburg, The Hague and in Munich. He has been actively involved in training programmes for conference interpreters for the European Commission and the European Parliament and co-directed a further education course at the University of Hamburg to train court interpreters, notably in languages of lesser diffusion.

On behalf of the AIIC Committee he co-organises legal seminars and promotes the “One Trial - Four Languages” Exhibition on the pioneers of court interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials, both in Europe and in the United States.

Ola Persson graduated from the University of Växjö, Sweden, with a degree in Marketing in 1987. During his initial work in a software company, he developed his language technology skills and formed his own company, WordFinder Software, in 1990. The main product, WordFinder Unlimited, is a subscription based dictionary service that complements other CAT tools. In 1995 Ola also started Trados Scandinavia, a franchisee of Trados GmbH. He operated both WordFinder Software and Trados Scandinavia between 1995 and 2007.

Ed Flower has been in the localization industry, working in technology marketing, for over three years and specialises in marketing to the Freelance Translator. Before this, he worked in marketing for the not-for-profit and financial sectors and has had first-hand experience (from the client side) of frustrations relating to poor translation workflows. Ed also understands and appreciates the frustrations of translators who are new to computer assisted translation tools, having experienced this learning curve when he joined the SDL Translation Productivity marketing team. He loves to share how he learned more about translation technology, in particular SDL Trados Studio, and to see how translators adopt technology to make their lives easier.